What goes into updating one of the most popular books about working with Python? After a decade of changes in the Python landscape, what projects, libraries, and skills are relevant to an office worker? This week on the show, we speak with previous guest Al Sweigart about the third edition of “Automate the Boring Stuff With Python.”
Al shares his thoughts on teaching Python and writing books over the past decade. In this third edition, he shares several new projects and updates to existing ones. We discuss Python tools for transcription, text-to-speech, notifications, and data storage.
We talk about the importance of debugging and improvements to Python error messages. He also shares a collection of resources, including conference talks, small projects, and Python libraries.
Course Spotlight: Exploring Scopes and Closures in Python
In this Code Conversation video course, you’ll take a deep dive into how scopes and closures work in Python. To do this, you’ll use a debugger to walk through some sample code, and then you’ll take a peek under the hood to see how Python holds variables internally.
Topics:
- 00:00:00 – Introduction
- 00:01:46 – The Recurse Center and scrollart.org
- 00:05:11 – Third Edition of Automate the Boring Stuff With Python
- 00:07:32 – The types of projects covered in the new edition
- 00:09:44 – What was the original page count?
- 00:11:00 – Learning Python and it being perceived as magic
- 00:12:00 – PyCon US 2025 - Make Python Talk and Listen
- 00:14:22 – Text-to-speech with pyttsx3
- 00:19:31 – Generating notifications and messages with ntfy.sh
- 00:22:09 – Exploring SQLite
- 00:28:26 – Teaching enough to start building
- 00:31:03 – The Recursive Book of Recursion
- 00:32:45 – Do you see a change in the audience of Python learners
- 00:35:36 – Expectations put upon a new Python learner
- 00:40:28 – What changes has 10 years inspired for the book?
- 00:43:40 – Teaching things in a new order and debugging
- 00:47:31 – Video Course Spotlight
- 00:48:56 – Including simple projects
- 00:54:12 – Book release timeframe and pre-orders
- 00:58:26 – In-line metadata for Python script sharing
- 00:59:33 – What are you excited about in the world of Python?
- 01:01:56 – What do you want to learn next?
- 01:04:34 – How can people follow your work online?
- 01:05:19 – Thanks and goodbye
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